Hard Question, Hard Answer by Joe Dees

Why are we the only ones?
Of all life,
We commit mass homicide,
Kill ourselves,
And befoul our only home.
Only we.

Why?

After painful meditiation
And careful consideration
I've come to believe
That we are infected
With a blessed, damned disease
Called consciousness.

Caught between beasthood and divinity
Between being of the world and not of it
Between knowing none and knowing all
Between utter self-ignorance and supreme self-understanding
We are the creatures of individual possibility.

In the natural world there is neither good nor evil;
With awareness comes the capacity for both.
That same infection which permits art, altruism,
Loyalty and loving care, allows violence, indifference,
Cruelty and psychosis,
For it spawns personality and its offspring
Personal choice.

I have come to believe in both the divinity
And the diaboly of human nature
And that they are inseparable.
Our disease is terminal
And all we can do is try to make the best of it
By striving to treat its more virulent symptoms
While reaping its manifold blessings.